Friday, August 24, 2012

An interesting story

I figure the best way to start a blog is to tell you my worst story from waiting tables.  It was a Friday night at about 7:30pm.  Incase you didn't know, that's rush hour for restaurants.  Anyways, I have this table of 5 and a table of 20.  In normal circumstances this wouldn't be a problem for me.  However, the family of 5 was giving me more trouble than I could handle.  I informed them that I had the large party right net to them and if they ever needed me for any reason to flag me down.  I also apologized in advance for how busy I was going to be.  They were real polite at first and told me not to worry.  Nothing is more relieving than having and understanding table.  Anyways,  it takes a while to make drinks for 20 people and hand them out.  When I finished with that I went over to the family to make sure they were alright and the woman looked me dead in the eye and complained that her pasta had tomatos and that she is deathly allergic.  I apologized and said I didn't hear her request for no tomatos.  That apparently set her off.  She stood up and talked to me as if I were here child.  She then explained to me that the menu did not say there were tomatos and that a good server would go over ingredients with guest before placing the order.  I smiled and nodded and offered to grab the manager.  She told me just wanted a new entree and to tell the manager to tell his servers how to properly take care of guests.  I informed my manager of the situation and we decided to just get these people out a soon as possible, if it means comping the ticket, then so be it.  I take the woman her new entree and she still seems angry at the world.  I go back a few minutes later to check on them and ask if they would like me to box anything up.  The daughter said she wants her pizza boxed. So, I reach across the table to grab it and right I place my hand on the plate the girls vomits all over my arm.  I was shocked and I don't handle vomit well at all and knew I had to remove myself or something worse could happen.  I was walking toward the bathroom when the mom stood up, grabbed me, and told me to help clean up her daughter.  A man from my larger table walks over and politely asks the woman to let me go and he tells her to clean up after her own kid.  That made me as happy as I could be in the situation. After I finished cleaning up,  I go back out to find the woman yelling at my manager about the horrible service they received.   The people at my other table who witnessed the whole ordeal, stood up for me.  We finally got her to leave and I got a lovely tip for the other table.